


won't find out what i know

by spikenard



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Fingering, Ghost Sex, M/M, psychic sex kind of, sexy possession
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-28
Updated: 2017-04-28
Packaged: 2018-10-24 20:14:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,883
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10748991
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spikenard/pseuds/spikenard
Summary: Rifling through the thoughts at the top of Adam’s mind, Noah said, “What am I supposed to do with your hand lotion?” and then “Oh my god, Adam, that’s sogay, do youlikethat?” and then “Huh! You do!”





	won't find out what i know

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pistolheart](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pistolheart/gifts), [vharmons](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vharmons/gifts).



> no additional warnings at all! just some good clean fun with consensual sexy possession ghost sex.

Adam realized Noah was visiting him when the thumping started.

At first, he thought there was something wrong with the car he was working on, somehow; then, he wondered whether it was Cabeswater, knocking politely at the edges of his attention, for once.

Then a rubber ball rolled under the Camry Adam was working on. It was cheap, the sort of thing you could get at the dollar store; it was the clear kind, with LED lights inside it, that lit up when it bounced. It was throwing off cheap red and blue flashes.

Adam moved a hand to roll it back out. After a few moments, the thumping picked up again, this time with a metallic reverberation that echoed through the body of the car.

“Quit it, Noah,” Adam said, pitching his voice loud. Noah didn’t. Adam finished tightening a last bolt and rolled out from under the Camry.

Noah was sitting on the hood of the car, knees pulled in against his chest. He bounced the ball against the hood one last time with a sharp flick of his wrist, and caught it in his palm on the way back up.

Adam rubbed the back of his wrist against his forehead. Noah rested his cheek against his knee and smiled at Adam, so sunnily that Adam almost couldn’t notice his smudge.

“You’re gonna dent the hood,” Adam said, too close to finished with his shift to keep the grumbling out of his voice, too tired to smother his accent.

“Am not,” Noah said.

Adam didn’t bother arguing. He’d heard Ronan and Noah going back and forth like this for fifteen full minutes, once, and Gansey’s longsuffering expression meant that they must have been going for a while before Adam showed up. They’d only stopped volleying cries of _am not! are too!_ back and forth at each other when Ronan had picked Noah up to throw him out the window again. Adam didn’t have the energy for that.

He was pretty sure Noah was pouting. Adam said, “I’m almost done here.”

He was. The Camry was finished; there was nothing left to do except close up and punch out.

Adam finished up, Noah drifting along behind him. When he pulled off his coveralls to shove them into his backpack, Noah let out an abrupt little shout. Adam startled. The rubber ball thudded to the ground, bouncing off to roll behind Adam’s work bench.

“Noah?” he said. But Noah was gone.

Adam sighed. He was about to turn back to his work when something grabbed his arm.

There was nothing there. But he could feel cold fingers curled over the thin skin of his wrist.

Adam said “Noah?” again, more uncertainly this time. The hand squeezed. A freezing and invisible thumb rubbed over his pulse.

“Adam,” Noah whispered. He sounded like Cabeswater, but Cabeswater didn’t call him by name like that.

“You’re still here?” Adam asked, just to make sure. The light-up rubber ball finally stopped flashing.

He was trying hard not to be freaked out, because Noah hated that, hated being scary, but the garage was dark and the woods out across the lot were rustling, and Noah’s hand was cold. Goosebumps were pricking up over Adam’s back.

The hand squeezed. “Tired,” Noah said, or maybe, _tired_ , the air whispered.

Adam swallowed. He wasn’t Blue; he couldn’t give Noah energy. But Adam knew what it was like to be so tired you barely felt like a person anymore.

“Cabeswater,” Adam said, and reached out. The trees outside rustled harder, or Adam could hear it more easily. He wasn’t sure what he was asking for, exactly. Some energy to lend Noah, some way to anchor him. The rushing and rustling in his ears increased.

Then Adam staggered. He felt cold all over, cold _inside_ , like someone had poured icewater straight through his ribcage. He couldn’t tell if Noah’s hand was still on his wrist; he felt that cold all over.

Adam caught himself with a hand on his workbench and just stood there, shivering. He didn’t see Noah anywhere, so that hadn’t worked; he wondered what he’d just done, then, why he felt so cold.

“Oh my god,” Adam’s mouth said, without any input from him. “Adam, what did you do!”

Adam held very still. One hand was white-knuckled on his workbench, but as he stood there he saw his free hand —

It was moving, slowly. Adam wasn’t telling it to; he’d had it clenched in a fist by his side. Instead, it was floating, into Adam’s sight. He told it to stop moving. It did.

“Hey,” Adam’s mouth protested. Adam could feel his lower lip jutting out; he knew he looked ridiculous, pouting. Adam sucked the inside of his lower lip into his mouth to chew over it.

While Adam was distracted, worrying his lip, worrying about talking, wondering what he’d just done, his moving hand made devil horns. Something made Adam wrinkle his nose and open his mouth, stick his tongue out.

“Awesome,” Adam’s mouth said. “Adam, this is so cool!” And then it let out a horrible giggle.

It sounded very different coming out of Adam’s body, hearing it resonate through his head and chest, but it was deeply familiar nonetheless, something Adam knew like he knew the grasping hooks of Ronan’s tattoo, the way Gansey plucked at the edges of his journal, the tufts of Blue’s hair. Adam got ahold of himself.

He knew that laugh.

“Noah?” he said, and felt his mouth stretch into a wide grin. The devil horns waggled.

###

Adam got used to being cold quickly enough. Or maybe he just wasn’t cold anymore; he couldn’t be sure.

Noah was in his body.

“Sharing,” Noah said. “We’re sharing. I can keep my hands to myself. I won’t be a bother,” he said, while Adam was trying to work out how he was going to get home like this. He wasn’t sure it would be safe to drive.

Noah was insisting he would be no trouble at all. One of Adam’s hands was fraying open the tear at the hem of Adam’s shirt. Adam, resigned, made it stop.

“Sorry,” Noah said, when he felt the motion still, “sorry.”

Adam finished wiping down the garage in peace. Noah hummed along to the radio; when Adam switched it off, Noah kept humming, tunelessly enough that Adam couldn’t recognize the songs.

Noah tried to tap his - Adam’s - their foot to the beat while Adam was reaching up to toss his rag into the dirty box. Adam lost his - their - balance. Noah swore, and then they both tried to apologize at the same time. _Sorry_ , came out of Adam’s mouth overlapping, half-stuttered, like a cassette tape glitching.

“Okay,” Adam said, once he’d pulled the doors down and locked up. He looked at his battered car. He didn’t think he’d manage to walk home. Noah kept trying to help.

Driving seemed like a worse idea.

“I can stay still,” Noah said. “I just didn’t realize before.”

Noah was rubbing Adam’s thumb over the inside of his belt loop, over and over, a flickering fidget. He really didn’t seem to realize he was doing it. Resigned, Adam said, “Just don’t move my feet,” and resolved to drive very slowly. Slower than Blue.

Adam got in the car, and turned it on. Noah drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. He jiggled Adam’s left leg, bouncing his knee. At least it wasn't the foot Adam had on the gas pedal. Noah reached over to turn the radio on while Adam was trying to navigate an intersection and needed both hands, and then sang along, loud and off key.

Adam was deeply relieved when they made it to St. Agnes’ in one piece. He turned off the ignition, but left his hand on the key, not quite ready to trudge upstairs yet.

“Can you hear what I’m thinking?” Adam asked, and before the words were out of his mouth, his body, Noah, said, “I can always hear what you’re thinking.”

Adam shut his - their - mouth.

“Sorry,” Noah mumbled. “Sorry.”

Noah must have been able to feel that it was okay. It made Adam tired, but he knew Noah couldn’t help it.

“I don’t mean to. I can’t hear them more than normal like this. And I keep secrets,” Noah said.

Adam said, “I know,” and got out of the car.

###

Noah said, “So,” once Adam shut his door behind himself. “I don’t know what you did. But.”

“Later,” Adam said, as firmly as he could. He couldn’t deal with this right now. He would figure out what was going on with him and Noah after homework. He didn’t work tomorrow after school. He felt, and Cabeswater seemed to agree, that if it didn’t resolve itself naturally — by Noah fading out for a while, or Adam’s body and magic rejecting a foreign presence, or Ronan coming over all Catholic and insisting on an exorcism — that it could wait until then.

“Let me just do my homework first,” he said, and Noah said, “Okay.”

Adam didn’t have much homework to take care of that night, which deeply relieved him. Noah scrawled doodling lines all over the margins of Adam’s math homework. They weren’t particularly intrusive — Adam could tell Noah was _trying_  — but he’d still have to erase them off before class.

His English reading was worse; Noah started ripping tiny halfmoon bites off the edges of the yellowed paper with Adam’s bitten fingernails, and then rolling the shreds of paper into miniscule balls, dropping them all over Adam’s desk.

“Here,” Adam said, finally, and dug around in his backpack for a pen he’d borrowed off Blue at one point and kept forgetting to give back. It wrote in purple ink, which meant Adam couldn’t use it for school. He’d used it to make notes about ley lines on the back of a receipt at Nino’s. Gansey had folded the receipt into his notebook, like it was as worthy as one of his newspaper clippings or photocopied book pages.

Most importantly, the pen was retractable, unlike the rest of Adam’s plain Bic ballpoints and wooden pencils. He put it into his left hand. “Go wild,” Adam said, and turned the page in his reading.

Tentatively, Noah clicked the pen. Adam made an agreeable noise.

Noah clicked it again. Reading one handed was a little more difficult than Adam had expected, but Noah was cooperative enough when Adam needed to actually annotate his reading, or turn a page. The clicking, which came more and more rapidly until it was near-constant, didn’t bother him as much as the knee-jiggling or finger-tapping or paper-fidgeting had. He could ignore it.

“Okay,” Adam said, putting his school things away. Noah put the pen down on Adam’s desk, almost reverently, and stopped moving Adam’s body, let him take care of things. Adam wondered, fleetingly, if some of Blue’s energy had been clinging to the pen.

“No,” Noah said. “She hasn’t touched it in like a week anyway. It’s just purple. That’s cool.”

Adam huffed a laugh.

Noah said, plaintive, “Are you done now? That was so _boring_. And I didn’t bother you at all!”

His tone indicated that he wanted praise for good behavior. Adam imagined ruffling Noah’s hair, as vividly as he could, and hoped Noah would hear it.

Noah laughed, bright and cheerful. It was an unfamiliar mood to hear in Adam’s voice. Adam hadn’t heard Noah this energetic in a long time, and almost never without Blue there.

“I know,” Noah said. “It’s like I usually use all my energy just to make myself be there. But now I don’t have to!”

Adam thought about all Noah’s restless energy, drained out of him and used up, just so he could be a tired smudged fingerprint of a person.

“Hey,” Noah said, a little injured. Right away, Adam said, “Sorry,” because he hadn’t meant it like that. “It’s just. Me too.”

Adam was tired, all the time.

He wondered if Noah was draining his energy now. He didn’t feel like it.

“You should go to bed,” Noah said, disapprovingly. “Sleep.”

Adam tried to argue, but he couldn’t think of anything urgent he had to do. He was done with his work. He had intended to do some things for the line tonight, but Cabeswater was content in his ear, shimmering behind his closed eyes.

And anyway, his body was already moving. Noah was standing, slowly, holding onto the edge of Adam’s desk, his movements clumsy. He pushed back Adam’s chair with his calf, and turned.

Adam said, “You don’t have to make me go to bed,” half-amused. He reached up to run a hand through his hair, and rub at his forehead.

Noah tipped their body over and collapsed into bed face-first. Adam said, muffled and into his pillowcase, “I’m still _dressed_.”

He felt one of his clenched hands unfurl its middle finger.

Adam burst into laughter, rolling himself over onto his side. He undid his jeans and kicked them off, kicked them out of bed to lie crumpled on the floor. He didn’t want to try to stand up with Noah riding under his skin.

Noah moved to pull Adam’s shirt off. Adam normally slept with his t-shirt on, less out of any particular desire to and more because Ronan was liable to drop by unannounced and it made him feel strange to open the door in nothing but his underwear.

Noah giggled, but didn’t stop his - their - hands from moving across Adam’s chest. Adam was kicking a blanket over himself. It was all a terrible muddle, Adam’s body trying to do three things at once, and then Noah’s hand - his _own_ hand - oh, mortifying - dipped just barely into Adam’s navel.

Adam shivered despite himself. And then, awfully, Noah’s hand stilled.

“Oh,” Noah said. Adam could feel his cheeks heat up. “Don’t be embarrassed,” Noah said quietly, in Adam’s voice. “It feels nice, right?”

Noah wasn’t doing anything. Adam took the opportunity to make his hands pull his shirt back down, over his stomach. His body was — Adam wondered whether that was him or Noah. Or just because his body was eighteen and Noah’s hands were nearly unfamiliar.

“No, that’s me,” Noah said, apologetic. “Um. I don’t get to feel like this a lot. I’m sorry.”

“Stop apologizing,” Adam said, tiredly. Noah said, “Um,” again, in a small voice, but nothing else after that.

Adam’s hand was resting on his shirt. He was perfectly still. He drummed his fingers against his stomach, but Noah didn’t take him up on the fidget: when Adam stopped, his fingers didn’t keep going on their own. Instead, they curled into loose fists. Noah was keeping his hands to himself.

He was hard; it was Noah’s fault, presumably, or at least Noah was claiming it as his fault. Adam struggled up his bed, until he could reach over one shoulder to the top of his minifridge, which served as his dresser. He grabbed the tub of hand lotion he kept there and unscrewed it, leaving it on his mattress, before lying back against his thin pillow.

“You can,” Adam said. “I don’t mind.”

Noah was silent. Briefly, Adam wondered if he was gone, if this had been the straw to kick Noah out of his brain. Out of his body. But no, Noah was still here, restless energy that made Adam want to move without anything to direct it towards.

Rifling through the thoughts at the top of Adam’s mind, Noah said, “What am I supposed to do with your hand lotion?” and then “Oh my god, Adam, that’s so _gay_ , do you _like_ that?” and then “Huh! You do!”

Adam wondered if Noah could normally hear everything he was thinking, like this. He hoped not. 

“Oh, I do,” Noah said. “But normally I’m too tired to say anything about it? Or there’s enough of you that I can’t really focus on, like, the _details_ of what _everyone_ is thinking. Or it would have been too hard to explain how I knew things. But oh my god.” 

And then Noah giggled a little. Adam was getting annoyed; it had just been a thought. 

He started to reach for the lid of his lotion, to close it and put it away and try to forget about this, but his hand stopped moving. Adam was a little surprised. 

“I didn’t say I wasn’t _curious_ ," Noah said. 

“Huh,” Adam said. 

Their hand fluttered. Noah was anxious. “Unless that’s weird?” 

“It’s not weird,” Adam said, even though it was, it definitely was. But it was weird the same way everything in his life was weird, farcical or all too serious. And he didn’t mind this. 

Noah reached for the lotion. He let Adam use their other hand to push his boxers down around his thighs, and then Adam also scooped up two fingers of the lotion, rubbing it between two fingers and his thumb. 

Adam pulled his legs up the bed, letting the blanket puddle at the footend, until his knees were pointing up at the slanted ceiling and his feet were firmly planted. He waited.

“Adam,” Noah said, fussy. He clearly didn’t know what to do.

“It’s not like it’s that complicated,” Adam said, which was kind of a lie, but not much of one. He tried not to think about his first, absolutely awful, attempts at this, hurried in the shower with the bathroom door locked, back at his parents’ double-wide. If Noah did it wrong Adam could help him. 

Noah said, “This is kind of gross,” and Adam huffed. Of course it was kind of gross. Sex was so _physical_ , and bodies were exhausting, heavy, limiting things. Adam sometimes, guiltily, envied Noah for being free of things. 

“The lube’s drying,” he said, so Noah wouldn’t feel like he had to respond to that train of thought. 

“Fine,” Noah said, and moved their hand in a sticky trail over the crease of Adam’s hipbone and down. “But if I touch anything gross —” and then “Adam, when was the last time you _ate_ something, that doesn’t actually make me feel better about this —” and then he was almost laughing, not out loud but Adam could feel the laughter bubbling in his chest. 

Adam was quiet, normally. Noah clearly wasn’t. He stopped talking after a second, rubbing two fingertips tentatively over Adam’s hole, gone all quiet and shy about it, and Adam managed to get his mouth back long enough to tell him, “Shut up.” 

Adam let Noah take his time. But he pushed in with both fingers right away, and Adam gritted his teeth. Noah could tell it was too much, so he slowed down, but he could clearly also that it was _good_ , that it was right, that Adam hadn’t just suggested this as a novelty, that he wanted the stretch and the feel of it. 

Adam assumed that’s what Noah could feel from him, or hear in his thoughts, or however it worked. He wasn’t sure what he was thinking, but clearly Noah knew what to do with it. 

Noah just had the tips of those two fingers pushed into Adam, but pulled them back out. Adam tilted his hips up for Noah’s fingers, for his own fingers, the familiar calluses but moving in totally unfamiliar ways. It was better than touching himself. 

Noah gasped at the thought, and pushed in with one finger. This time he pushed in further, wiggling his finger a little as he went. “Oh,” Noah said, forcing air out of Adam’s lungs. He’d been holding his breath. “Oh, that feels —”

Noah was shifting his foot over Adam’s bedspread, making it hard for Adam to keep his hips tilted up. Adam reached down and gripped the base of his dick, curled his fingers over his balls, just for the warmth of his hands. 

It didn’t really work — his hands were cold, and he let out a hissing breath — but Noah gasped as if he liked it, kept Adam’s hand there and rocked his hips into it. He pulled Adam’s finger back out to thrust in with it, clumsy and enthusiastic, working the second finger back in right away. Those fingers were cold too, but Adam had assumed it was the lube; maybe it was just Noah.

Adam didn’t know — this was just — it was a lot, goosebumps were crawling over his neck and shoulders, his hands cold and his balls trying to crawl inside his body, the stretch at his hole a little too much but smooth. He hauled a huge gasping breath into his lungs and shuddered it out. 

If it had been him, and Adam might have done some of this, pushing to two fingers right away for the first time in a while to feel the stretch, or holding his junk like that even though it was uncomfortable and too-cold, his hand icy against his dick, dick burning-hot against his thumb, touching himself and getting the feedback of both toucher and touched. Adam choked back a moan and Noah echoed it back to him, open-mouthed and _loud_ , enthusiastic in ways Adam just didn’t know how to be. 

If it had been Adam, he would have taken it slow; Adam took his time with this, now, when he could. He appreciated the luxury of privacy, the luxury of his own supply of hot water, to use as he wished, in carefully-measured out intervals. 

He appreciated the way lotion made things easier, how he could do this in his bed, now, didn’t have to keep his balance in the shower, using soap or shampoo or whatever slippery thing he could get his hands on. 

Noah moved his fingers in and out and Adam felt his dick twitch, his muscles tense. The slide was so good, slow, and Noah was pushing his fingers in _deeper_ than Adam usually did, enjoying how slick his fingers were. Adam rocked his hips up, trying to chase it, trying to help; this wasn’t how Adam usually did it, usually it was just counterpoint to jerking himself, just enjoying the tug and stretch at his rim, but this was good, too, Noah reaching inside him with Adam’s fingers. 

Noah shifted the hand around Adam’s dick, too, moving it off Adam’s dick entirely to tug at Adam’s balls, to dig bitten nails into the soft skin of Adam’s stomach, to restlessly shift his hand up and down Adam’s skinny thigh. His hand wasn’t as cold anymore; touching Adam was warming him up. 

Noah pushed his fingers further into Adam, curled forward and trying to _reach_ , and rubbed a frigid knuckle against the tender skin just behind his balls, and Adam went electric; he yelped and it was his own voice, Noah saying _yeah_ into the noise and Adam didn’t even care about how stupid he must sound. 

Noah was smug, and did it again, pushing _in_ and digging his knuckles in, like he wasn’t sure which way he’d gotten to Adam but didn’t want to risk not getting it to work again, and Adam had to pull the hand at his balls away. 

He wanted to touch himself. He couldn’t figure out where the lotion was, so he pushed up onto his tiptoes trying to lift his hips up for Noah and fisted his hands in the bedspread. He was close, and he wanted to touch himself. 

“Elbow,” Noah panted, and Adam couldn’t figure out what that was supposed to mean but he looked down, and that was where the tub of lotion had ended up, right next to his elbow. _Thanks_ , Adam thought absently, and Noah sighed out a breath and twisted his fingers inside Adam, trying to corkscrew them in deeper. 

Adam stuck his hand into the tub, clumsily, leaving deep indentations in the cream. He ended up with way too much on his fingers, but he didn’t care; he had to get his hand on his dick. 

It was harder than it had probably ever been in his life, pressed flat against his stomach where he was curled upwards, leaking a small puddle of precome onto his belly. 

Adam ran a fingertip through it, and Noah tried to lift Adam’s hand to his mouth. Adam wondered why. Maybe to lick it. But Adam didn’t let him. 

His hand on his dick was the best thing Adam had felt in his life. It was cool but not freezing, not like Noah’s hands usually were; the lotion was thick and clingy, almost slowing the movement of his hand as he spread it over his length. 

Noah pulled his fingers out and Adam reeled at the shock of emptiness, very nearly tipped over on his side. But Noah just wiped some of Adam’s excess lotion onto his own fingers and pushed back in, just as fast and greedy as before. 

Noah scissored and twisted his fingers in deep, pushing just right at that spot Adam hadn’t figured out how to reach himself. Adam squeezed at his dick, made his hand tighter around himself than he usually liked it, and Noah let out a trembling moan.

This position was uncomfortable. Adam’s mattress was hard, but even the minimal give it offered meant that the arches of his feet were twinging where he was trying to force himself higher onto his tiptoes, and Adam could feel a stretch in his thighs, in his calves, in his abs, where he was curling forward. But his fingers were long, and Noah knew how to use them, or at least he could tell when something was working, because it was perfect, just right. 

“God, Adam,” Noah said, and his voice, Adam’s voice, was still close to breaking. It was embarrassing, humiliating, to hear himself like that, but somehow that just made it better-worse, more intense, drove Adam right to the edge. 

“Please,” Noah said, and he must know what this was doing to Adam, how Adam wanted to grit his teeth and keep his voice trapped in his throat. He didn’t, though, he did his best not to stop Noah, just jerked himself harder and faster, so it would have hurt without the lotion, and arched for Noah’s fingers. 

When Adam came it crumpled him up. His dick pulsed against his palm and he could feel himself clenching around Noah’s fingers, around his own fingers; he could feel a throbbing in his low back, in his toes, in the dip where his spine connected to his skull. 

It took him powerfully. Adam felt like he was unraveling, being turned inside out. 

When he came back to himself, he was panting for breath, knees akimbo. His vision was blurred. Noah was hovering next to him. 

Adam pulled his fingers out of himself and wiped them on the sheets; he was going to have to wash them anyway. Or burn them.

Noah said, “I barely felt that before you kicked me out,” and he was complaining a little but it wasn’t a whine, either. Not petulant. It was almost strange to hear his voice again.

“Sorry,” Adam said, still dazed, still struggling to breathe, still feeling his heart thump hot and painful against his ribs as it slowed back down. He felt bad that Noah had been cheated out of the best part. 

“Don’t be,” Noah said, and smiled, a quick flash of a grin. “Still fun.” 

He was fading at the edges now that he wasn’t bounded inside of Adam’s skin. “Mmm,” Adam said, and reached up with one of his messy hands to touch Noah’s neck, to tug him down. Adam pressed his mouth to the corner of Noah’s, just under his smudge, and Noah let out a noise Adam had never heard from him before. 

“Oh,” Noah said, and then he was running his freezing fingers over the sensitive skin just by Adam’s navel. 

Adam yelped and managed to bang his knee against the low ceiling. Noah cackled, and did it again; Adam rolled on top of him, ignoring the cold, and rubbed his knuckles into Noah’s fluffy hair. 

“Gross!” Noah exclaimed, delightedly, and then licked the fingertips he’d run over Adam’s stomach. They had Adam’s jizz on them, Adam realized, hazily. 

“I can’t really taste it like this,” Noah said, mournful. 

Adam was nearly asleep. “We’ll do it again sometime,” he mumbled. “If you want.” If Adam could figure out how to get Cabeswater to do the same thing twice. If Adam had a free night. If Fox Way confirmed that letting a ghost into his body wasn’t dangerous. 

Noah giggled. “Letting me _inside_ you,” he said, and waggled his eyebrows. Adam watched him, fond but only capable of a half smile and a huffed laugh. He let his palm collide with Noah’s cheek and rubbed his thumb under Noah’s eye. 

It didn’t feel dangerous. Even now that Noah was sometimes a strange and wild creature, he was Noah. He was as subject to the line as Adam was himself. 

Adam rolled over into the wet spot and made a complaining noise into his pillow. He was too tired to move. 

“Go to _sleep_ ,” Noah said, fading. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Adam fell asleep with his desk lamp still on. When he woke up in the morning, the bulb had burnt out. 

**Author's Note:**

> ronan probably should have indicated whether that hand lotion was for external use only, huh.
> 
> for pistolheart, who prompted me "ghost sex", and vharmons, for being the reason this pairing occurred to me. also thanks to horology bc i came up with this concept in a chatfic like four months ago. title is from fall out boy's 'grand theft autumn / where is your boy,' which i was listening to for unrelated reasons and then got stuck in my head while writing this. 
> 
> catch me on [tumblr](http://spikenards.tumblr.com)


End file.
